Feasibility Study of Wearable Muscle Disorder Diagnosing Based on Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducer

This work demonstrates a high-performance imager of muscle-like phantoms based on a piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducer (pMUT), which aims at wearable muscle disorder diagnostics. A 23×26 pMUT array is fabricated for both transmit ultrasonic pulses and receive echoes, and its resonant frequency is 5 MHz in mineral oil with a −6 dB bandwidth of 40%. Ecoflex and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) are used to mimic different tissues including muscles and fat. The PMUT array is excited by 2 cycles 5 MHz sine wave pulse signal with amplitude of 10 Vpp, and mechanically scanned two muscle-like phantoms that standing for normal and disordered muscles respectively. B-mode images are generated using the received pulse-echo signals, and the theoretical axial resolution of 2-pulse excitation is calculated to be 0.75mm. These preliminary results demonstrate the potential of pMUT in medical ultrasonic imaging, especially muscle imaging.